Boarding the Darwinian Bus
Climbing the ladder of increasing complexity is not a recent thing. For example, the first trees were probably much shorter than the ones we have today. As soon as one tree species in some ecological niche chanced to grow just a bit taller, it forced all other trees in that niche to grow taller, too. Failing to do so meant living in the shadow of the taller trees and so getting less sunlight. As in a self-reinforcing arms race, all the trees grew as tall as was possible, given the limits on incident sunlight, ground minerals, and hydrostatic pressure.Similarly, once upon a time plants probably couldn't defend themselves against the insects that ate their leaves. Then one plant's cells began, by chance, to produce an insecticide---a chemical that kills insects. Some insects then retaliated by developing immunity to it, and the plants developed new insecticides---which some insects also adapted to. In an ever-escalating cycle, the process continued, until today broccoli, for example, consists about 10 percent by dry weight of natural insecticides.
If at a football match everyone in front of you stands up to see better, you must stand up too---if you want to see the game. Then, if all the others stand on their seats, so must you. Like standing on seats, escalation can stop, of course; but anyone who tarries too long on the highway of life is likely to get run over. Zebras start running a little faster to escape lions, so lions have to run a little faster to catch zebras. But then zebras have to run even faster, because while the lion is running for its lunch, the zebra is running for its life.
We're caught up in the same old arms races today, although---because we've managed to outcompete most of our usual predators and para- sites---we mainly race with ourselves. Today, internal forces are driving us to augment our intelligence and create machine intellects. Any massive intellect, however, will eventually gain the power of life and death over everyone it serves. So what life-forms, you might ask, would be stupid enough to engineer their own demise? We would.
We will do so, in all probability, because of military and commercial escalations. For example, most major cities are between six and ten minutes away from a nuclear submarine attack. We can't juggle all the options in that short a time, so we're shunting ever more of the routine decision making to ever-faster computers.
Businesses too need more capable and more autonomous machines for exploration, control and prediction, and increased production. Few of us are willing to work at dirty, dull, demanding, or dangerous jobs. How would you like to be a sewage disposal engineer at a nuclear waste site? The problem is that once we make machines competent enough to do these kinds of jobs, they'll also be competent enough to collect our garbage, mow our lawns, clean our houses, and guard our property. Most of us who once did those things will then be unemployed---outcompeted by machines.
Once one business develops a new and complex computer system to stay one step ahead---whether in a bank, a chemical refinery, or a power plant---competitors will have to get one as well. If they don't, they go under. Lunch or be lunch.
Every step up the ladder of rising complexity forces us to take the next step up. And each step leads to unforeseen new steps. For example, imagine how happy disabled people would be with a legged wheelchair that can handle all terrains controlled by their thoughts alone. The military and industrial uses of such a device, however, would be even more dramatic. If ever such a breakthrough occurs, more than the lives of the handicapped would change.
Imagine, for example, how happy a military service would be to get a small, cheap, legged robot that can crawl up a drainpipe or down a shoreline carrying a listening device---or an explosive. Only a few decades later those robots would be so cheap, effective, and widely available that civilians could use them to spy, steal, or kill. Then, in the usual escalating arms race, security services would have to use them for defense. Then criminals would use better ones to regain their edge. And so it goes. Each escalation pushes us into the next escalation.
Eventually, we may end up with machines so complex that none of us will truly understand them. That point may not come in the unimaginably far future, either. We may reach it in forty years. Just twenty years separate Yury Gagarin's Vostok I flight from the first launch of the shuttle Columbia. Just thirty-five years separate the discovery of our genetic structure from the first patented artificial animal. Just two generations watched the Kitty Hawk evolve into stealth bombers, Sputniks into Voyagers, waterwheels into nuclear power plants, and fireworks into hydrogen bombs. Our technology is now melting, flowing, and reforming into new and alien shapes, faster and faster, so fast that prediction has become nearly impossible.
Careening Between Pollyanna and Cassandra